LBJ and Grassroots Federalism: Congressman Bob Poage, Race, and Change in Texas reveals the local ramifications of federal policy. Three case studies in the rising career of Lyndon B. Johnson show this in action: LBJ's formative experience as a New Dealer directing the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Texas; his key role as senate majority leader in breaking the deadlock to secure funds for the Lake Waco dam project; and the cumulative effect of his Great Society policies on urban renewal and educational reform among the Mexican American community in Waco. In each of these initiatives, Bob Poage—though far more politically conservative than Johnson—served as a conduit between LBJ and citizen activists in Poage’s congressional district, affirming the significance of grassroots engagement even during an era usually associated with centralization. Robert Harold Duke's careful analysis in LBJ and Grassroots Federalism also offers a unique insight into a transformational period when the federal government broke down barriers and opened doors to the engagement of African Americans and Mexican Americans in community planning processes and social policy.

LBJ and Grassroots Federalism: Congressman Bob Poage, Race, and Change in Texas reveals the local ramifications of federal policy. Three case studies in the rising career of Lyndon B. Johnson show this in action: LBJ's formative experience as a New Dealer directing the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Texas; his key role as senate majority leader in breaking the deadlock to secure funds for the Lake Waco dam project; and the cumulative effect of his Great Society policies on urban renewal and educational reform among the Mexican American community in Waco. In each of these initiatives, Bob Poage—though far more politically conservative than Johnson—served as a conduit between LBJ and citizen activists in Poage’s congressional district, affirming the significance of grassroots engagement even during an era usually associated with centralization. Robert Harold Duke's careful analysis in LBJ and Grassroots Federalism also offers a unique insight into a transformational period when the federal government broke down barriers and opened doors to the engagement of African Americans and Mexican Americans in community planning processes and social policy.

LBJ and Grassroots Federalism: Congressman Bob Poage, Race, and Change in Texas reveals the local ramifications of federal policy. Three case studies in the rising career of Lyndon B. Johnson show this in action: LBJ's formative experience as a New Dealer directing the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Texas; his key role as senate majority leader in breaking the deadlock to secure funds for the Lake Waco dam project; and the cumulative effect of his Great Society policies on urban renewal and educational reform among the Mexican American community in Waco. In each of these initiatives, Bob Poage—though far more politically conservative than Johnson—served as a conduit between LBJ and citizen activists in Poage’s congressional district, affirming the significance of grassroots engagement even during an era usually associated with centralization. Robert Harold Duke's careful analysis in LBJ and Grassroots Federalism also offers a unique insight into a transformational period when the federal government broke down barriers and opened doors to the engagement of African Americans and Mexican Americans in community planning processes and social policy.

"Come to Texas" urged countless advertisements, newspaper articles, and private letters in the late nineteenth century. Expansive acres lay fallow, ready to be turned to agricultural uses. Entrepreneurial Texans knew that drawing immigrants to those lands meant greater prosperity for the state as a whole and for each little community in it. They turned their hands to directing the stream of spatial mobility in American society to Texas. They told the "Texas story" to whoever would read it. In this book, Barbara Rozek documents their efforts, shedding light on the importance of their words in peopling the Lone Star State and on the optimism and hopes of the people who sought to draw others.Rozek traces the efforts first of the state government (until 1876) and then of private organizations, agencies, businesses, and individuals to entice people to Texas. The appeals, in whatever form, were to hope?hope for lower infant mortality rates, business and farming opportunities, education, marriage?and they reflected the hopes of those writing. Rozek states clearly that the number of words cannot be proven to be linked directly to the number of immigrants (Texas experienced a population increase of 672 percent between 1860 and 1920), but she demonstrates that understanding the effort is itself important.Using printed materials and private communications held in numerous archives as well as pictures of promotional materials, she shows the energy and enthusiasm with which Texans promoted their native or adopted home as the perfect home for others.Texas is indeed an immigrant state?perhaps by destiny; certainly, Rozek demonstrates, by design.

Sherry Arnstein, writing in 1969 about citizen involvement in planning processes in the United States, described a “ladder of citizen participation” that showed participation ranging from low to high. Arnstein depicted the failings of typical participation processes at the time and characterized aspirations toward engagement that have now been elevated to core values in planning practice. But since that time, the political, economic, and social context has evolved greatly, and planners, organizers, and residents have been involved in planning and community development practice in ways previously unforeseen. Learning from Arnstein’s Ladder draws on contemporary theory, expertise, empirical analysis, and practical applications in what is now more commonly termed public engagement in planning to examine the enduring impacts of Arnstein’s work and the pervasive challenges that planners face in advancing meaningful public engagement. This book presents research from throughout the world, including Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Portugal, Serbia, and the United States, among others, that utilizes, critiques, revises, and expands upon Arnstein’s aspirational vision. It is essential reading for educators and students of planning.

At the intersection of the growing national conversation about our food system and the long-running debate about our government's role in society is the complex farm bill. American farm policy, built on a political coalition of related interests with competing and conflicting demands, has proven incredibly resilient despite development and growth. In The Fault Lines of Farm Policy Jonathan Coppess analyzes the legislative and political history of the farm bill, including the evolution of congressional politics for farm policy. Disputes among the South, the Great Plains, and the Midwest form the primordial fault line that has defined the debate throughout farm policy's history. Because these regions formed the original farm coalition and have played the predominant roles throughout, this study concentrates on the three major commodities produced in these regions: cotton, wheat, and corn. Coppess examines policy development by the political and congressional interests representing these commodities, including basic drivers such as coalition building, external and internal pressures on the coalition and its fault lines, and the impact of commodity prices. This exploration of the political fault lines provides perspectives for future policy discussions and more effective policy outcomes.

Those individuals remembered as the "founders" of cities were men, but as Elizabeth York Enstam shows, it was women who played a major role in creating the definitive forms of urban life we know today.

Thousands of black men died violently at the hands of mobs in the post–Civil War South. But in Brazos County, Texas, argues Cynthia Nevels, five such deaths in particular point to an emerging social phenomenon of the time: the desire of newly arrived European immigrants to assert their place in society, and the use of racially motivated violence to achieve that end. Driven by economics and the forces of history, the Italian, Irish, and Czech immigrants to this rich agricultural region were faced with the necessity of figuring out where they fit in a culture that had essentially two categories: white and black. In many ways, the newcomers realized, they belonged in neither position. In the end, they found ways to resolve the ambiguity by taking advantage of and sometimes participating directly in the South’s most brutal form of racial domination. For each of the immigrant groups caught up in the violence, the deaths of black men helped to establish racial identity and to bestow the all-important privileges of whiteness. This compelling and superbly written study will appeal to students and scholars of social and racial history, both regional and national.

Texas pride, like everything else in the state, is larger than life. So, too, perhaps, are the state’s challenges. Lone Star Tarnished approaches public policy in the nation’s most populous "red state" from historical, comparative, and critical perspectives. The historical perspective provides the scope for asking how various policy domains have developed in Texas history, regularly reaching back to the state’s founding and with substantial data for the period 1950 to the present. In each chapter, Cal Jillson compares Texas public policy choices and results with those of other states and the United States in general. Finally, the critical perspective allows us to question the balance of benefits and costs attendant to what is often referred to as "the Texas way" or "the Texas model." Jillson delves deeply into seven substantive policy chapters, covering the most important policy areas in which state governments are active. Through his lively and lucid prose, students are well equipped to analyze how Texas has done and is doing compared to selected states and the national average over time and today. Readers will also come away with the necessary tools to assess the many claims of Texas’s exceptionalism.

In The Chicano Generation, veteran Chicano civil rights scholar Mario T. García provides a rare look inside the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s as they unfolded in Los Angeles. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with three key activists, this book illuminates the lives of Raul Ruiz, Gloria Arellanes, and Rosalio Muñoz—their family histories and widely divergent backgrounds; the events surrounding their growing consciousness as Chicanos; the sexism encountered by Arellanes; and the aftermath of their political histories. In his substantial introduction, García situates the Chicano movement in Los Angeles and contextualizes activism within the largest civil rights and empowerment struggle by Mexican Americans in US history—a struggle that featured César Chávez and the farm workers, the student movement highlighted by the 1968 LA school blowouts, the Chicano antiwar movement, the organization of La Raza Unida Party, the Chicana feminist movement, the organizing of undocumented workers, and the Chicano Renaissance. Weaving this revolution against a backdrop of historic Mexican American activism from the 1930s to the 1960s and the contemporary black power and black civil rights movements, García gives readers the best representations of the Chicano generation in Los Angeles.